What's the deal with Bee Movie? Why someone watched Jerry Seinfeld's cartoon 357 times in 12 months

It was mainly forgotten on release, but the Dreamworks animation has gained an unlikely afterlife among online pranksters. Does that explain one UK viewer’s devotion?

Name: Bee Movie

Age: 10 years old.

Appearance: insect-based, feature-length animation.

Do you mean Antz? No. Antz is about ants. This one’s about bees.

What about A Bug’s Life? That’s another insect-based animation, but it’s not this one.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Bee Movie. You’re not alone. Greeted with mixed reviews, Bee Movie has the distinction of being Dreamworks Animation’s third lowest grossing computer-animated film.

What’s it about? It’s about a bee called Barry B Benson – voiced by Jerry Seinfeld – who rebels against the beehive mentality of, um, the beehive.

So it’s no good. Well, some people like it. The Guardian awarded it four stars when it was released. And one obsessive UK Netflix subscriber watched it 357 times last year.

Who? Netflix didn’t release the name, just the figure.

Why? For publicity. Netflix wants you to know how popular the service is, but it doesn’t want to give away any actual ratings for particular films or series.

So instead it is warning us about an unstable individual in our midst? To be fair, Bee Movie does have a kind of cult status.

One troubled loner watching the same cartoon every day for a year does not constitute a cult. There’s another person in Spain who has seen it 281 times.

Two still isn’t enough, even if they write to each other. Even before this, Bee Movie was an established internet meme.

I’ll have you know I barely understand what a meme is. Until last month I was still pronouncing it me-me. Let’s just say the film has garnered a measure of ironic affection over the years. People have posted versions where the movie gets faster every time someone says “bee”, or slower, or more pixelated.

Why would they do that? Who knows? The entire screenplay of Bee Movie is also regularly used for shitposting.

Sorry, shitposting? The posting of awkwardly large amounts of mediocre or ironically appropriated content to a social media site for the purposes of annoying everyone.

People do seem to have a lot of free time these days, don’t they? They do indeed.

Do say: “Honestly, I’ve never even seen the whole thing. I just leave it on for the cats when I go to work.”

Don’t say: “When’s Bee Movie 2 coming out?”

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